Conventions Revision

Which were the most influential conventions for you? How did your study of them affect your decisions and outcomes?

One influential convention was the questionnaire, as the data I collected was extremely significant as I would take all of it into account when making the magazine. I made questionnaire to hand out to members of the class in order to gather other people’s opinions about what they would like to find in a magazine they would buy. It would be interesting for me to see if there were any factors that completely went against what I was planning to do. Included in the questionnaire were questions relevant to the type of magazine I was planning on doing. For example, data was collected on topics such as; favourite music genre, what the person would find to be most enticing, if they would like a free sample CD included, how many albums/singles the person purchased per month, and how much the person would be prepared to spend on a music magazine. Gender was also noted so I could see if there was any difference in what the two genders preferred when the results were eventually put together. I analysed this information carefully, and I went on to use the information when creating the magazine. For example, there was an equal split through preferred music genre. This enabled me to focus more on what genre I would prefer to make the main focus of the magazine. My opinion didn’t count as much for other topics, as the results of the questionnaire really helped me to make some decisions. A good example of an obvious preference was the question about the enticement of the magazine. Many people said that they would be enticed by interviews and reviews, rather than the other options which were available to them. These other options included news and freebies. So using this information, I decided that the main focus of my magazine was going to be an interview with an up and coming star of rap music. After collecting the information from the questionnaire, I immediately discarded the news and freebies ideas and focused on the interviews and reviews option. The questionnaire served me really well, as it enabled me to look at other people’s opinions. This stopped me from including things that only I thought would look best in the magazine, which could have made the magazine look bad.

Other useful conventions that I included in my blog were the professional magazine analysis and the magazine drafts. In terms of the drafts, they allowed me to see what I needed to improve in order to step up and increase the quality of the final product. I am going to talk a lot more about the magazine research though, as this was definitely the most influential convention out of the two. Looking at the front cover, contents page and double paged spread of professional magazines, such as NME and Karrang, increased my knowledge of what these pages should look like. For example, I gained a lot of knowledge of how the contents page should be structured in order to make it look good and be easy to read. Without this research, I wouldn’t have had anywhere near as much of an idea of how these pages looked in professional magazines. I spent a lot of time completing this research, as I analysed a total of five different pages in detail. I looked at the text to image ratio, the structure of the whole page, the positioning of images and text, the use of colour and the relevance of it and the subject of the less significant headlines. All this information became incredibly useful to me when I moved on to designing my magazine. I tried to take into account some of the things I had picked up from these professional magazines. For example, one of the things I noticed about most of the contents pages was that there was an image in the middle of the main body of text. The content of the magazine was usually listed on the left side of the page. I decided to include this structure in my contents page. Without looking at this particular magazine layout, I would have spent more time deciding what structure I wanted to follow for my contents page. I would have had no clue about how magazines structured these pages.

Overall, all these conventions made a massive impact on the way my magazine turned out at the end of the year. My magazine pages looked similar to those of professional magazines, when they probably wouldn’t have had I not abided by these conventions. There was a very big contrast between this and the work I had produced for the preliminary task. During the preliminary task, I was not required to complete any of these detailed conventions. I think that because of this, my work during it suffered in comparison to the main task. I didn’t really have a clue about what a professional magazine looked during the preliminary task, and due to this the quality of the pages was very poor. I remember my contents page looking absolutely terrible. Of course it is obvious that I had nowhere as much time to complete it, but still it was very poor in my eyes.

Did you subvert any conventions that you studied in music magazines?

I did go against some of the conventions that I studied for the magazine, one of which I remember made a big impact. The two main conventions I went against were the use of colour that I found in professional magazines, and the amount of images used in them too. In terms of the colour, I noticed that a lot of the magazines I analysed had an expansive range of bright, vibrant colours. A lot of them had front covers with colours such as red and blue as the background, but I went against this and used black. I did originally use grey for the front cover, orange for the contents and blue for the double page spread. If I had kept these colours, there would have been a lack of consistency on this aspect, as the professional magazines tended to stick to a certain colour or range of colours. However, for my final design, I decided to go with a black background for all three pages. I did this because it made the content on each page stand out more, and I struggled to decide on any other colour anyway. Black seemed like an obvious choice at the time. I think that the decision had its pros and cons. It was good in the way that it created a sense of consistency and it mad the content stand out well, but it was quite risky because it went against the research that I had collected from the professional magazines.

In the case of the amount of pictures I included in the magazine, I don’t think that there were anywhere near enough and I think that this went against me. I only included four pictures in my magazine; three of the main subject, and one of the band who were displayed on the contents page. I did this because I originally thought that this amount would be enough when I looked at all the pictures I had taken. I didn’t actually take that many pictures and they were all pretty similar with little variety. Looking back on it now, I should have planned what pictures I wanted to take more carefully before actually taking them. There weren’t really enough or any valid reasons to only take this amount of pictures, so I am not sure why I did it. It was a very bad thing to do, and was something that probably cost me dear in the end. So in this case, it definitely didn’t work.